Operating systems

QTads is a cross-platform multimedia interpreter for Tads (Text Adventure Development System) games. Both Tads versions in use today (Tads 2 and Tads 3) are supported. It should be easy to port to a range of platforms, including embedded devices. MIDI, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound formats are supported.

FrobTADS is a complete rewrite of the Unix
console-version of TADS ("Text Adventure
Development System"). It uses curses (or ncurses)
and provides an interpreter to play games
developed with TADS as well as the TADS 2 and 3
development tools. It adds support for a number of
relatively recent user interface features
including full support for text and background
colors, TADS 3 banner windows, and timed input.
It's also much more portable and more easily
maintainable, as it's built to modern Unix standards.

The Gamebook Engine is a cross-platform engine for
writing gamebooks, such as the "Choose Your Own
Adventure" series or the "Lone Wolf" series. TGE
can interpret scripts that use the "Hyena"
gamebook format.

Hugor is a Hugo Runner, meaning a program in which you can load and play adventure games created with Kent Tessman’s Hugo authoring system. Hugor supports all graphics, sound, and music formats of the Hugo engine. Video, however, is not yet supported.

PYZ is a Z-Machine interpreter for playing interaction fiction files. Text adventure games written by Infocom, such as the Zork series, used a then-revolutionary virtual machine called the Z-Machine, which saved code space on the memory-limited computers of the 1980's. People today are still writing text games, now called interactive fiction, for the Z-Machine platform. PYZ includes a mode in which you can see the instructions being executed, turned on by the --trace option. A test suite, pyztest, tests all the instructions.